Annual Research Theme

Recent trends in Classics scholarship have focused on widening access to the discipline and concomitantly, widening definitions of its content. The move to decolonise Classics has encouraged fruitful study of marginalisation and alterity in the ancient world as well as heightening disciplinary awareness of how social and racial prejudices can influence Classics’ curricula and research agendas.

Taking inspiration from this disciplinary self-reflection, this year's research theme adopts a decolonising approach to ancient authorship. It contests the traditional view of ancient authors as elite individuals writing for elite audiences and expands the very concept of authorship to explore the roles played by socially marginalised and overlooked groups in the creation, preservation, and dissemination of ancient texts. What relationships can be traced between social status, identity markers, and literary production in the ancient world? How were slaves, freedmen/freedwomen, and non-citizens involved in the creation of ancient texts? How can we better appreciate texts’ dissemination and preservation by anonymous or uncredited intermediaries such as scribes, pedagogues, graffitists, and performers in the theatre? Building on recent contestation of rigid identity categories, we see ‘status’ itself (in terms of class, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability, citizenship) as fluid and moveable, with individuals moving between enslaved/free, elite/non-elite, citizen/foreigner, disabled/abled during their lifetime or, in some cases, depending on the eye of the beholder. Through a series of seminars and a concluding conference, we consider how various and multivalent status groups participated in ancient literary production, and how their often-unacknowledged influence affects our understanding of ancient texts.